The fact that one of the gay men attacked happened to be the Pastor’s own son, Jerry Pittman, Jr., no doubt contributed to Pittman senior’s noxious edict. According to Pittman Jr., after hearing his Dad yell, “SICK’EM!:”

“My uncle and two other deacons came over to the car per my dad’s request. My uncle smashed me in the door as the other deacon knocked my boyfriend back so he couldn’t help me, punching him in his face and his chest. The other deacon came and hit me through my car window in my back.”

The attackers also verbally assaulted the couple continually with anti-gay verbiage which continued even after a Sheriff’s Deputy arrived on the scene. Bystanders and other congregants made no effort to stop the assault. For that matter, neither did the Deputy Sheriff. Once the barrage of punches ended, the Deputy refused to let the two victims press charges.

Jerry Pittman Jr. and his boyfriend, Dustin Lee, have since filed charges against two of the men who beat them as well as Pastor Jerry Pittman. A hearing has been scheduled in Gibson County Court for Tuesday, October 4th.

Yeah, that was from last year. No idea if anything ever came of it, I read one article that said they were having difficulties finding a lawyer to represent them (the two gay men). Allegedly one of the men involved in the assualt claimed to have been stabbed in his garage by two men in masks and another packed up and moved a day before his house lit on fire. Weird and crappy.

"There’s a lot more to this story than it appears. The son and bf had been attending the church for 2 yrs without incident. THings got ugly between father and son when the son reported to his stepmother than his father was cheating on her. Divorce proceedings ensued (significant that, in the event the church folded, the church property reverted to the father’s name and would be part of the divorce) and the son still showed up for services on the morning in question. It couldn’t be proven that the father yelled ‘sick em’, but it became clear that, when the elders approached the son/bf to tell them to leave, the son lashed out first. Unfortunately for him this makes it self-defense in the eyes of the law and he killed his own case. Regardless, it’s also pretty clear that the elders used seriously un-Christian words – fag etc – against them in this incident, so shame on them. Can only speculate about the son’s motivation for showing up where he knew he was no longer welcome, but it’s not likely his main purpose was to worship."

It was a cheque, made out in my name, for $95,093.35 and it came in a junk-mail letter from a get-rich-quick company. It was worthless, meant only as a financial tease, a lip-licking come-on. “This is how much money you could soon be making.” What it was never meant for was deposit. But that’s exactly what made the thought of depositing it so irresistibly funny. What could possibly be funnier than depositing a perfectly ridiculous, obviously false, fake cheque? (Did I mention it had “non-negotiable” clearly written on it?) So, as a joke, I deposited the fake cheque into my bank’s ATM. I felt like a million bucks doing so. I’d never had so much fun at my bank. Come to think of it, I’d never had any fun at my bank until the moment I endorsed the back of this “cheque” with a smiley face and slipped the Monopoly-like money into the mouth of the hungry ATM. For the first time ever, I walked away from my bank laughing.

There is no 10-day rule that protects you on a bounced cheque. It is a 24-hour rule! In the United States, when a bank receives notice that a cheque paid into your account has bounced, it has 24 hours to notify you and, if it fails to do this, you are safe to spend the money. Pretty neat, I say. Secondly, I learned that what I thought was a fake cheque was legally a real cheque. A little-known change in the 1990 Uniform Commercial Code made it so that the words “non-negotiable” printed on a cheque do not invalidate it. It may have been just a small footnote change but what I deposited was, marvellously, an accidentally real $95,093.35 cheque.

Well then, I thought – as he finished showing me through the archives – I’m not going to argue with the guy who invented the computer. After about 20 minutes of walking me through his contributions to technology, he sat down, finished his coffee, glanced at his half-eaten pastry now-cold, checked his watch and announced: Well, I have to go now.

Belarus has taken strong diplomatic action against Sweden following a stunt involving parachuted teddy bears.Sweden says all of its diplomats have been expelled from Belarus, which has also closed its embassy in Stockholm.Belarus was angered when a Swedish public relations firm dropped about 800 teddy bears with pro-democracy messages from a light aircraft.President Alexander Lukashenko sacked his air defence chief and head of border guards over the 4 July incident.He told their replacements not to hesitate to use force to stop any future air intrusions from abroad.

This. It happens to me all the time. I guess I haven't tended to conceptualise it as a "John Cage" moment, but it's a definite moment of spiritual nourishment - the audible equivalent of the impulse that made me take up photography.

Another point about the Mars lander: an earlier Mars mission led to a much better understanding of Earth's atmospere, which led Carl Sagan and others to develop the theory of Nuclear Winter, which quite possibly tipped the blance within the Reagan administration against the idea that a nuclear war was winnable and helped convince Reagan to take Gorbachev's offer of an arms reduction treaty seriously.

Serendipity, motherfucker.

Not to mention a big chunk of that $2.5 billion was spent developing the inflatable heat shield and the flying crane used for the final landing - both of which will probably be used on future spacecraft returning to Earth making reuseable launchers cheaper which in turn will lower the cost of weather satellites, comms satellites and the other satellites that the dumbass who made that post benefits from every day.